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-- message I saw on trip advisor forum today

Seeing this message today while planning a holiday drive up the coast of New South Wales reminded me of a spate of recent PM necroposts, such as:

It feels especially eerie when a necroposter responds to a monk who's not been sighted for so many years that he may well have passed on to become a necromonk. I get the feeling that necroposts have been on the rise here lately - interested to hear theories why. (Update: Re^4: Code style advice: where to put "use" statements? indicates that Bod enjoys the Random Node feature in Leftovers on bottom right of PM screen ... perhaps renewed interest in Random Nodes has increased the frequency of necroposts).

Though I found many previous discussions of anonymous posting (see "Previous Anonymous Monk Discussions" section below), I couldn't find any previous discussions of necroposting. Hence this node. Though my personal opinion is that necroposts are beneficial, I'm interested to learn how other monks feel about them and how they might be improved.

Why I Like Necroposts

As a serious code-golfer for many years I watched in dismay as ... the perl fwp and golf mailing lists died ... the 2002 TPR golf series lasted just one season ... Terje's minigolf site came and went ... as did the kernelpanic.pl Polish golf site, codegolf.com, phpgolf.org, and many more ... while Perl Monks lives on and on and on!!!

The upside is that PM's extreme longevity, combined with its low barrier to entry for non monks to post, has resulted in many invaluable nuggets posted by non-Perl-monk code golf experts. Without PM's low barrier to entry, many of this priceless golfing lore would have been lost for all time.

While most of these responses were made anonymously (signed with the name of the poster), I was pleased to see the greatest code golfer I know of, primo, going to the bother of creating a PM account, solely to respond to PM code golf threads.

Some examples (many more could be given):

As a final example of valuable necroposting, I've been grateful to jdporter for necroposting historically priceless nuggets of Perl Monks history to The First Ten Perl Monks (2014):

Possible Necropost Improvements

I suspect some of the recent necroposts (especially the anonymous ones) were made accidentally (i.e. without the poster being aware they were responding to a thread that was over 10 years old) ... and so wonder if it would be good to provide some sort of warning that you are responding to a really old thread. Some sort of visual indicator decorating the necropost response itself may further be worth considering, so that folks viewing recent nodes can easily spot the necroposts.

Necropost References

Previous Discussions

Necroposts Added Later

Five necroposts with consecutive node-ids by Deven made on Feb 25, 2022.

These necroposts are mostly identical and relate to adding commas to numbers via regex in perlfaq5. The nodes replied to were made on: Jan 18 2000 by vroom; May 27 2013 by Zzenmonk; Mar 02 2001 by fundflow; Aug 17 2000 by Kozz; Aug 17 2000 by merlyn.

Continue necroposts made in 2022...

PDL necroposts by etj

Many many more necroposts from etj were made in 2022, typically to PDL-related nodes, too many to list here (e.g. see the many replies to the 2019 node: RFC: 101 Perl PDL Exercises for Data Analysis).

Update July 2022: etj was making so many necropost replies, I simply didn't have the energy to keep up :) but this story now has a happy ending because he's kindly provided us with a summary of his many and varied PDL necropost exploits at: Reflections after going through all PDL-featuring nodes on PerlMonks.

Updated: Minor changes to wording and example node list in "Why I Like Necroposts" section. Many necropost replies (especially by our necropost master etj :) were added in the "Necroposts Added Later" section long after this node was originally written. July 2022: Added new "PDL necroposts by etj" section. July 2023: Added Do we ever want to freeze threads? by talexb (2004) -- I missed this when I wrote the original node.

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